FLIGHT.
In the street Lady Bell set out walking rapidly—she dared not
run—straight on in the opposite direction from her lodging. She had a
conviction that she would get out of the town presently, and on the
great road, where she might overtake a conveyance.
She had an instinctive perception that Mrs. Sundon, however grateful and
concerned that Lady Bell should not suffer by her magnanimity, would be
too much taken up with Mrs. Sundon’s own husband, with enlarging to him
on the risk he had run, and the necessity of prudence in his future
movements, to enter at once into a searching investigation of what had
become of Lady Bell, and an eager tracking of her footsteps. After Mrs.
Sundon had discovered that Lady Bell had not waited, but had gone with
as little ceremony as she had come, Mrs. Sundon would naturally conclude
that she had returned immediately to her husband, to prevent all
suspicion, and to carry out her programme. For Lady Bell’s own sake,
Mrs. Sundon would resolve to be quiet on the incident of her visit.
Lady Bell reckoned herself secure of not being missed by her husband for
hours; and so soon as she was beyond the town the probability of her
being recognised was lessened. She could venture to walk more slowly,
and not wear out her strength at starting, to raise her veil, to push
down the neckcloth wound about her chin and mouth, and allow herself a
breath of the cool autumn air, in the fever heat of her progress, and
the agitation which had attended on her adventure.
It was in the latter end of the month of September, but the season and
weather were fine, and there were still hours of daylight.
Lady Bell was furnished with money; she had got an ample sum to spend at
Peasmarsh. The idea which had been in her head when she had still
thought of confiding her case to Mrs. Sundon, and bespeaking her
support, was to be put in the way of reaching London as speedily as
possible.
When in London she might apply to any survivor of Lady Lucie’s friends
to hide her from Squire Trevor and his vengeance, to procure for her a
separation from him, to help her to get her own livelihood. This would
no longer be by the poorest place at Court—Lady Bell had resigned that
aristocratic resource—Queen Charlotte was too good and happy a wife
herself to pardon readily the errors of a miserable young wife.
But Lady Bell’s vision had enlarged so that she conceived—Lady Bell
though she was, she might be _dame de compagnie_ to some old lady of
quality, on the model of Lady Lucie Penruddock.
Or she might turn her little talents and accomplishments, the
frivolousness of which had been so scouted, to use, after all, by
imparting them to the children of some great house.
Her imagination had grown, like everything else about her (she was half
an inch taller since her marriage), though even her imagination could
not persuade her that the bread of service would taste anything save
bitter to a woman of her degree, but it would be less bitter than what
she had eaten at Trevor Court and St. Bevis’s, and bitter as it might
be, it was all the bread that remained to her, unless she were willing
to go back and be killed by Squire Trevor.
On the contrary, she could not help rejoicing that she had left him and
bondage behind, and that the world was before her. The sense of freedom
and of a new life sent a certain glow and throb of elasticity through
her veins.
Lady Bell trudged on alongside the ragged hedges, and keeping by the
posts which marked the king’s highway, in the broken, deeply-rutted
road. She ceased to see any trace of the election, beyond a spurring
messenger now and again. The few travellers were of an honest though
homely description. The electioneering had done good for the moment,
scoured the neighbouring country, and collected the stoutest beggars,
the most rampageous tramps, into their dens in Peasmarsh.
There was a rustic yeoman, mounted on his best cart-horse, with his
sister behind him, clasping him round the capacious waist, trotting away
to spend the evening in hunting the slipper and roasting hot cockles
with some neighbours. There were farm-servants and labourers hieing home
from their day’s work ere nightfall.
These wayfarers glanced with a little wonder at Lady Bell, even in her
ordinary scarlet habit, and her neckcloth, as a lady who ought to be on
her horse, with her servant behind her, and who might be on foot and by
herself as the result of an accident, or in consequence of keeping a
private appointment. But these were worthy people who took their
neighbours’ adventures coolly, and did not, when they were not accosted
and asked to interfere, see themselves called on to forsake their proper
business and pleasure for the sake of a third party, in an adventure
which might be sorry enough.
The country folks were much the same as those whom Lady Bell had stared
at in the light of a novelty on the occasion of her journey from London
to St. Bevis’s. It was not quite a year since then; Lady Bell was still
only between fifteen and sixteen, an age, indeed, not very practical,
and alternating between rashness and timidity.
She walked on in the lengthening shadows and growing chilliness, not
knowing whither she walked, only feeling that she was getting tired and
footsore. She resisted, for a wonderful length of time, the perplexity
and downcastness which stole over her, and took the place of her foolish
satisfaction.
But fatigue and uncertainty increased until they well-nigh overpowered
her, and she was in danger of sinking down at any moment in utter
exhaustion and consternation, weeping at the prospect of having to stay
there all night, and of dying of cold, if she were not murdered by
footpads.
At last a country cart, on which a number of pieces of furniture, chests
of drawers, and bookcases were piled, indicating the removal from one
dwelling to another of some household of condition, came along, and drew
up just after it had passed Lady Bell.
She was too inexperienced a traveller, and had been too dispirited to
call to the driver and ask him to give her a cast in his cart. When he
stopped, her strained nerves caused her heart to beat fast, while she
urged her trembling steps to carry her on, as she pretended not to
notice the stoppage.
The driver was occupied with a commission and a puzzle of his own. He
first peered through the sinking sunbeams, and next shouted after her,
leaping from his cart, flinging down his reins—confident in the
discretion of his team of horses, running heavily in pursuit, and
finally laying a powerful hand on Lady Bell’s shoulder to arrest his
object. Happily, he spoke in the same breath, before she shrieked out,
with no Squire Trevor near at this time to come to the rescue.
“Holloa! madam, be you parson’s new wife as I was to overtake and pick
up, if so be she hadn’t met and ridden on with parson? We ha’ mounted
and wedged in the feather bed, ready, where yo’ll sit soft and steady,
and I ha’ been told to take you to the town.”
Lady Bell recovered her wits immediately. “No, my good man,” she said;
“I think the lady must have met her husband, since it is getting late;
but will you let me take her place till we come up with her?”
The man in the smock had pulled his forelock, had looked and spoken
simply and kindly, and she believed she could see that she might trust
him, while her circumstances would hardly be rendered more wretched
though he failed her.
The driver consented without any difficulty, and hoisted her carefully
to her seat, where, as the horses jogged on, she could think of nothing
for a time but the welcome rest and comparative ease which had succeeded
her sore weariness and flagging exertions.
But as the sun set, the evening fell, and the September night-air blew
chill and cold, the horses floundered in and out of the holes in the
road; the countryman shouted to the horses in language which Lady Bell
could not understand, with a violence which seemed to contradict her
impression of his kindliness, and he took it upon him to beguile his way
with a lusty stave, fit to split her ears.
Lady Bell began to think that she knew of no house to shelter her, no
bed to lie down upon, except that on which she sat by a countryman’s
charity. Her deed might have got wind, her husband might be following
her; and what countryman, for the very reason that he was simple and
honest, would keep a runaway wife from her husband? Then she commenced
to shake and shiver as with an ague fit, till even the attention of her
unobservant companion was called to her.
“Dang it!” he cried in loud but not unfriendly surprise, “you are not so
afeard as that of the footpads? Why, none of them has been heard on for
weeks in these parts. And if they did turn up, I lay it, they would not
be the rogues to put hands on a cart with sticks of furniture, and the
loike of a parson’s wife, with a husswife, and a groat or two in her
pocket, i’stead o’ king’s gold. My Liz wouldn’t be so bad at the
ghosteses; but mappen it is the night air gotten into your bones—you
beant cold now, be you? There ought to be a bed-cover here-a-ways.”
Lady Bell took heart again, and observed to herself that if he roared to
his horses, he did not strike them; and he spoke gently of his Liz,
though poor little Lady Bell had not much experience of the home
charities which soften a man, be he fine gentleman or clown. But she was
capable of distinguishing that her companion pulled out the woollen
bed-cover, and wrapped it round her feet with good will.
After that, the stars shone out in the sky; and she could read this in
them, with her childish, ignorant eyes, so much accustomed to look at
artificial ceilings, whether painted in fresco, or moulded in stucco, or
left simple oaken beams—so little used to look at the blue vault of
heaven, what Daniel read on the walls of a Babylonish palace, the
handwriting of a divine presence, the same which still finds the mighty
monarch wanting, and watches over the desolate and oppressed.
Back at Peasmarsh, Squire Trevor had been engaged in a deeper carouse
than usual; had been carried home dead drunk to his lodgings, and had
slept off the fumes which had mounted to his brain, before he learnt the
absence of Lady Bell.
In the meantime, the partially informed landlady had been quite
unconcerned since she had learnt by Lady Bell Trevor’s own hand that she
had gone to a friend’s where she might stay late.
The landlady was not surprised that the young madam had stretched her
tether and lain at her friend’s; nay, was she not better out of the way,
the worthy woman calculated, though she herself was not at all sensitive
with regard to the state in which her lodgers were brought home to her
house. Moreover, she had known many a madam not much older than Lady
Bell, make no bones about it, but take it as a matter of course, that
their gentlemen should be lifted out of their chairs like so many logs
on their return from the tavern, and not be fit to bite a finger when
they were set down.
But the woman was thrown into the utmost dismay by the effect of her
words, and by the changeful gusts of passion, each more terrible than
another, which her announcement roused in Mr. Trevor.
Lady Bell had no friend in Peasmarsh, or out of it. She had played him
false. She should rue it to the last day of her life. He should never
let her put a foot within his doors again.
Zounds! had a girl like Lady Bell been exposed in a place like Peasmarsh
at a time like this, all night? She must have been decoyed, made away
with. He would give Trevor Court—his life—to see her in honour and
safety again. He would cause this woman, who had suffered Lady Bell to
be lost, to pay for it with her miserable means, her vile body. He
should have her before a magistrate, lay her in prison, and leave her to
rot there among the demireps, and felons, who were fit company for her.
“Oh, gracious sir! have mercy on me!” implored the woman, “listen to
reason! I never knowed there was any harm in my lady going abroad, when
she had been flourishing up and down, here and there, and everywhere,
for the last ten days, by your own orders, Squire. I’ll take my Bible
oath on that; and you too up to the ears with the ’lection to bear her
company. How could I know that she were to go wrong all at oncet, and be
lost, and bring this trouble on my poor innocent head?”
An unexpected arrival came to the landlady’s aid. Mrs. Walsh, the
Squire’s cousin, entered, walked up to the Squire, and spoke to the
point of his misery and his conscience.
“I have ridden over, cousin, because I have heard word that, in your
arrogance and lust to win this canvass, you have been exposing Lady
Bell, like a bird with its wings unclipped, to the snare of the fowler.
Now, by the first word I hear from you, the bird has flown, or been
stricken down, and its blood be on your head.”
The difficulty of the situation in which Squire Trevor was placed, could
not have been surpassed; even if Lady Bell had deliberately selected the
occasion of her quitting him for the purpose of baffling and
discomfiting him, she could not have succeeded better. He could not
throw up the chances of his election, and abandon his party and his
supporters in order to seek her. Political feeling ran too high then, to
admit of such a course, even in a more devoted husband than Mr. Trevor.
His very vanity and obstinacy which, without knowing that she had
divulged his secret and provided for the safety of his enemy, were
enlisted in recovering his marital rights, and humbling and punishing
Lady Bell, were equally enlisted in his standing to his colours, not
showing the white feather, and going through with, and, if possible,
winning the election.
It became a matter of peevish policy even, and of rage repressed, that
it might be more scathing in the end, to be gloomily silent on the
domestic misfortune which had befallen him. He was constrained to seek
in the dark in order to discover what could have become of Lady Bell. He
had to let rumour give out that she was gone, while the person most
concerned concealed the inexplicable nature of her absence.
Thus it happened, that Lady Bell Trevor’s disappearance was whispered as
a mystery in Peasmarsh, and that all sorts of astounding and
contradictory accounts prevailed.
It was said that Lady Bell had gone up secretly to London, to see about
getting a King’s patent for conferring a peerage on Squire Trevor,
because she, a peer’s daughter, could not brook the descent involved in
her being married to a simple commoner.
On the other hand, it was whispered that Squire Trevor was so displeased
with his wife, because she had lost him Goodman Rickards’s vote, which
Madam Sundon had beguiled from Rickards, by presenting all the women of
the Rickardses with feather tippets, while Lady Bell had only gone the
length of bestowing cloth spencers; that Squire Trevor had determined,
without delay, on parting from Lady Bell. As she had no private fortune,
or even pin-money, he had whipped her off to France, with the view of
confining her in a convent for the rest of her life.
There were other individuals besides Mr. Trevor in Peasmarsh, who were
behind the curtain; but who, however anxious and full of pity, were
reduced to listening to these absurd stories, and to doing nothing
beyond contributing one or two opposite and enigmatical advertisements
which were inserted, at this date, in the Peasmarsh _Chronicle_.
The first was a bounce, and ran as follows: “Information is demanded
immediately by the lawful guardian, with respect to the minor who has
broken bounds and is in hiding, whose hiding-place will be tracked
without fail, and to whom it will be worse in the end if immediate
satisfaction is not granted.”
The second entreated thus: “The deeply indebted friends of an innocent
sufferer, beseech that sufferer to afford them the opportunity which is
ardently desired to relieve undeserved misfortunes.”